Cat Kid Comic Club: Perspectives

It’s another day at Cat Kid Comic Club, and the frogs in the class are having trouble paying attention. Maybe it would help to see something from the other person’s perspective?

Of course, ‘perspective’ has more than one meaning when it comes to comics. It can mean visual perspective or a specific point of view in a picture, and a narrative point of view: that is, the person telling the story.

Creating stories within a story, Pilkey uses a variety of techniques - including acrylic paints, coloured pencils, Japanese calligraphy, photography, collage, gouache, watercolours, and much more - to portray each frog's perspective as they ‘create’ their own cool little comics, all in different styles. There are also frequent ‘how-to’ sections showing readers how to create their own comics.

The genius of the Cat Kid Comic Club series is that, as well as being a fun story, each book is teaching readers how to draw comics and about all manner of literary and artistic devices such as perspective, characterisation, dialogue, colouring, drawing and more. Parents and teachers that think this is a fart humour comic with little merit otherwise are sorely mistaken – Dav Pilkey is incredibly smart, and knows how to reach and teach kids in a way they love.